Informed Decision Difficult For City Leaders

Jim Spencer

November 12, 2000|By JIM SPENCER Daily Press

Imagine being a boss who asks employees for a copy of a critical memo filled with information that affects the most important business decision of your career. Imagine being told by your subordinates that you can't have a copy of the memo.

If you sat on the Hampton City Council, that's the way you got treated as you prepared to vote on the commitment of $90 million of public money to build a convention center. The city commissioned a study of the financial prospects and potential clients for the proposed convention center and paid for it with taxpayers' dollars. Then the staff refused to make copies of the study public and even held it back from council members unless they came to City Hall to read it.

As a result, three members of the council, Turner Spencer, Paige Washington and Rhet Tignor, apparently voted for the project last week without ever reading the study. Another council member, Ross Kearney, reportedly approved the project after reading only a portion of the study. Councilman Tom Gear voted against the project without ever consulting the consultant's report.

Washington told Daily Press reporter Mark Di Vincenzo that he didn't have time to go to City Hall to read the report but got a briefing on the document from city staff members. Gear said he didn't have time to go to City Hall either. Tignor said he talked personally to an author of the study and spent dozens of hours studying the convention center issue generally. Spencer said he didn't need to read the report because the city manager had already read the appropriate portions to him.

But the fact that city officials made the report difficult to get to raises concerns.

Actually, in this case there isn't much question that the tail wags the dog. When McNeeley-Walker showed up at City Hall to read the consultant's report last Tuesday, she said City Attorney Paul Burton cautioned her about taking notes.

She took notes anyway.

All of this cloak-and-dagger treatment stems from the city staff's claim that the report contains sensitive market information that other local communities could use if they chose to build competing convention centers. So the city has tied itself in a self-defeating knot to keep the study secret. The city's legal staff has declared the report an administrative "working paper" not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This created a municipal Catch-22 in a project City Manager George Wallace has called "the opportunity of a generation."

In its zeal to keep the information from potential competitors, the city also has kept it from the folks who must pay for the convention center. And city officials made the elected representatives of those taxpayers jump through hoops. All this intrigue surrounds an endeavor that is the most important since Hampton built the Coliseum more than three decades ago.

If the convention center is that important, encumbering the folks with the most at stake makes no sense, even at the risk of letting Virginia Beach or Williamsburg in on what organizations the convention center in Hampton hopes to attract.

"I was not elected so the staff could decide what I can and cannot see," said McNeeley-Walker.

So the day before the convention center vote she spent two hours going through the entire report in a conference room near the city manager's office. She moved to the conference room, she said, because she was distracted by Wallace's and Burton's presence in the manager's office where she had first been asked to read the report.

Rather than try to cram it all in at the last minute, McNeeley-Walker would have preferred to read and digest the information in the report on her own schedule in the weeks before the vote.

But at least she got around to looking at it.

That some of her colleagues did not sends a strong message:

No competitive advantage exists in making it harder for leaders to make informed decisions.

Especially when you're talking about "the opportunity of a generation."

Jim Spencer can be reached at (757) 247-4731 or by e-mail at jlspencer@dailypress.com or Talk Back to Jim Spencer at http://dailypress.com/spencer.htm